1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle inspection apparatus for inspecting behaviors of control objects mounted on a vehicle.
2. Description of Related Art
There are known various vehicle control systems including means for inspecting control objects mounted on a vehicle. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-99120 discloses a vehicle control system in which its inspecting process is organized hierarchically into different levels, and an inspecting function is set for each of the different levels. The lower level includes a distributed inspecting function provided for each of the respective control objects. The higher level includes an inspecting function includes a function of adjusting the distributed inspecting function of the lower level. For example, each distributed inspecting function of the lower level supplies status information thereof to the inspecting function of the higher level, and the inspecting function of the higher level supplies the status information supplied from each distributed inspecting function of the lower level to a diagnostic unit.
However, even in the above vehicle control system where the inspecting process is hierarchized, since each of the inspecting processes performed by the distributed inspecting functions of the lower level is specific to its associated one of the control objects, when there is change in the control objects mounted on the vehicle, it is necessary to modify the inspecting processes regardless of vehicle types being the same or different. In addition, in a case where the higher level also performs inspecting processes for the control objects, if there is change such as addition, deletion or replacement in the control objects, it is necessary to modify the inspection process performed in the higher level in accordance with this change.
In this case, if the vehicle control system is configured such that all of the inspecting processes including the ones not affected by the change in the control objects are modified, it takes a lot of time and labor to perform the modification. This disadvantage occurs irrespective of whether the inspecting process in the vehicle control system is hierarchized or not.